Fireballs

As the title indicates, so far this month, we've seen more extreme weather, more sinkholes, a volcano erupting that had been dormant for 400 years, more fireballs, UFOs and strange 'sky' sounds. They're all definitely signs of the times!

Astronomers are hoping to get a close look at an asteroid Monday as it makes a relatively close pass to Earth.

The space rock, known as 2001 AV43, will approach within 650,000 miles, or 2.7 times the distance from the Earth to the moon. That is considered an eyelash width in cosmic terms.

The rapidly spinning asteroid, discovered on Jan. 5, 2001, by MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, is flying by at a relative velocity of 8,000 mph and has an estimated diameter of between 100 and 230 feet.

That makes it about the same size as the rock that created mile-wide, 550-feet deep Meteor Crater in Arizona about 50,000 years ago. That one was 165 feet in diameter and exploded with the equivalent force of 10 megatons of TNT.

The angle of approach of 2001 AV43 makes it a good radar target for the Goldstone Deep Space Network in California's Mojave Desert and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, scientists say.

Meanwhile, astronomers using observatories in Hawaii are gathering information on two recently discovered and surprisingly large near-Earth asteroids.

Tura - A meteorite falling in the areas bordering Bangladesh created panic among the residents of the Garo Hills region. The meteorite, which fell inside Bangladesh, lit up the night sky around 10.30 pm last night. It was eagerly watched by the residents living along these areas.

The meteorite fell close to the Dumnikura BoP in the Sherpur district of Bangladesh, just beside the international border and the impact was heard even 40 km away from the area where it fell. Dumnikura is a border outpost in the South Garo Hills, very close to where five police personnel were killed last week.

A resident of the neighbouring Dalu village in West Garo Hills, Dipu Marak, was witness to the incident.

He said, "We heard a loud noise around 10.30 pm last night and immediately rushed outside. We were in a state of shock. The meteorite lit up the night sky and narrowly missed us."

Other local residents said the whole area shook under the impact of the fall and the light could be seen even on the Indian side of the border.

Panic-stricken people, who ran out of their houses, said that the sound resembled that of an aeroplane's at a close range.

I've been shooting photos for 20 years. I've made my living in the profession for the last 15. I can count on one hand the number of times that everything lined up perfectly and a truly rare image was created. Now, I don't want to toot my own horn about this shot, but the fact that, during a 30 second exposure, after a 10 second timer (during which I hopped down from the roof of my truck where the camera was on a tripod, and joined the scene by the fire), a meteor (or so they tell us) would enter the sky EXACTLY in the corner of the frame and explode in the very part of the frame that needed balance, just as I had finally worked out the correct exposure and lighting to match the foreground with the night sky, is beyond rare. It's a non-chance. There is no way to plan for something like this. No way to even hope for it.

But lest you get the impression that I'm subscribing to a lifestyle of reliance on freakish luck, there is a deeper game at play here. Namely this: If you shoot enough arrows, eventually you'll pull a Robin Hood and split the arrow that was already a bulls-eye. When I took this shot, it was the final day of my project shooting fall landscapes in the American West. Five weeks previous, I had left Seattle in my truck with no mission beyond creating and sharing beautiful photography as I chased good weather almost all the way to the Mexican border. Every morning, I was up shooting the sunrise.

Huntsville - NASA says the fireball that streaked across Alabama Sunday night was a piece of a comet about as wide as a can of soda. The comet was caught on four of NASA's sky watch cameras about 7:22 p.m. CT.

"It was picked up at an altitude of 55 miles moving east of south at 51,000 miles per hour," Dr. Bill Cooke, director of NASA's Meteoroid Environments Office at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, said today in an email. "It burned up at an altitude of 27 miles just south of Anniston."

Based on the "light curve" created by the fragment's passing, Cooke said it was "about 2.5 inches across and weighed about 5 ounces. It was six times brighter than Venus at its peak."

Los Angeles -- A bright meteor lit up the Bay Area sky on Friday night.

Bay Area News Group photographer Ray Chavez snapped pictures of it from San Lorenzo and then tweeted them.

This is the third night in a row that large meteors have been spotted. Right now we are in the midst of the South Taurids meteor shower. It peaked last month, but can still produce stunning shooting stars.

Two surprisingly large Near-Earth Asteroids have been discovered in just the last week or so, as well as a third moderately large asteroid which surprisingly has also gone undetected until now, even though it can pass close enough to the Earth to be classified as "potentially hazardous".

Not since 1983 has any near-Earth asteroid been found as large as the approximately 20-kilometer (12-mile) size of the two new large ones. In fact, there are only three other known near-Earth asteroids that are of comparable size or larger than the two new large ones.

It is important to note that none of these three new large near-Earth asteroids can come close enough to the Earth to represent a near-term threat to our planet.

The first of the new large near-Earth asteroid discoveries is named 2013 UQ4, and it is perhaps the most unusual. This approximately 19-kilometer (12-mile) wide object was spotted by the Catalina Sky Survey on Oct. 23 when the asteroid was 435 million kilometers (270 million miles) away from Earth. Not only is this object unusually large, it follows a very unusual highly inclined, retrograde orbit about the Sun, which means it travels around the Sun in the opposite direction of all the planets and the vast majority of asteroids.